


Divergence

by ALC_Punk



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-08
Updated: 2010-08-08
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ALC_Punk/pseuds/ALC_Punk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After stopping the end of the world in a time machine, learning to just be a doctor again isn't hard... mostly. Then again, there are aliens out there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Divergence

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: this is what I was doing instead of writing my big bang. whoops. This is also what happens after I listen to Paul read the Whovie novelization, apparently. Contains references to Torchwood Scotland

Grace Holloway had two database files. The first one was her cardiac patients, routine notes on their conditions and care, addresses, billing information--the normal detritus of a working doctor. The second file was encrypted, password-locked, and the information it contained was sporadic, though it was in very careful order. Sometimes, there were treatment notes, billing information, dosages. Other times, there were notes on physiology and pathologies. Most of it made no sense, if one assumed the patients were human.

It happened gradually. She spotted anomalies, differences, began making notes on them. It seemed smart to keep the files under lock and key. They would be evidence of her need for psychiatric observation, otherwise. And those who came to her, who began recognizing her as someone discreet and careful, would prefer their differences not be found out.

Labeling them 'aliens' was merely a shortcut, in a way. They came from all sorts of planets and time zones (one of them mentioned a dimensional rift somewhere south of L.A.). The database started to contain more than just quick and obscure notes. She managed skeletal structures, MRIs and one or two autopsies (even aliens worry about how their family died).

Word got around, in the alien community. That sort of thing always did. After a year, she had a steady stream of patients. She had to be careful to treat them, trusting only one member of her staff with the knowledge of their existence. 

Betty Wahl was a hard worker, smart, dedicated, compassionate and good in a crisis. The first time someone bled green on her, she didn't flinch, just patched them up and tucked them in. 

After washing her hands, she'd found Grace in her office.

"Dr. Holloway. About the patient in Exam Four." Sitting down, Betty perched on the edge of the chair, as though she were a bird about to take flight.

Grace hadn't intended anyone else to take that patient, but something had come up, a conference call she couldn't back out of and time had gotten away from her. She looked uncertainly at Betty. "Yes?"

"Should I assume that bleeding green isn't a bad sign?" Betty was fishing, curiosity in her eyes.

That she hadn't run screaming into the night, signed herself into a psych ward, or called the police was a good sign. Still, Grace had to be careful. The last nurse she'd had working for her had called the tabloids. It had taken her a few months to fix the damage it had caused. "The color is fine, the amount may not be."

"Knife wound, I believe. He's stitched up and sleeping now," Betty relaxed a little into her chair, and met Grace's eyes. "What is he?"

"You wouldn't believe me."

"I've spent ten minutes cleaning green blood out from under my fingernails. Try me."

Somehow, Grace ended up starting at the beginning with the man who wasn't a man, who changed his body for a new one when she'd killed him on the operating table. Betty seemed to take it in stride, leaning forward and listening eagerly as Grace talked about the end of the world and time travel. When she moved on to the local 'community', Betty grew more somber. 

They were interrupted to deal with an emergency, and it was several days before they conferred again. 

"I'm surprised you've taken this all so easily."

Betty shrugged a little, then tapped her pen on her notes. "I think this physiognomy is impossible, but it could be worse."

There were three circulatory systems, and Grace wasn't entirely sure the thing had a digestive track of any sort. She frowned at it and made a notation. "Oh?"

"I grew up in Sunnydale, Dr. Holloway. You get used to odd things."

There was more to it than that, but Grace didn't press. Betty would give up her secrets in her own time, or she wouldn't tell them at all. 

It was a good working relationship.

-=-

Time, and technology, changed. Grace got better at pin-pointing problems, and the population of aliens slowly rose. It wasn't just the lack of the death. Grace had never wanted to be a mid-wife, but when a large, sentient yellow hippo-like thing is whimpering as she gives birth, you learn to do things far beyond your normal skill-set.

The family made her a God-parent, though she got the impression it wasn't something the Catholic church would approve of.

Betty took night classes, working on another degree in zoology. The expanded knowledge-base worked wonders the next time the sentient crocodiles came through on their extended migration.

-=-

The problem was, eventually _someone_ was going to come investigating them. Grace looked the old man up and down and raised her eyebrows at him. "Can I help you?"

His accent was Scottish, thick and nearly indecipherable. He gave a truculent moan, glaring around from under bushy brows at her. "You've got an alien problem."

"I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. Sir." She kept her eyebrows raised.

There was a moment of nothing, and then he chuckled, "Don't mean the human kind."

Putting on her best professional soother tone, Grace smiled at him, "Can I call you a psych consult, sir?"

"Don't need your damned headshrinker. Just need to know 'bout the aliens."

"Mhmm. The ones that aren't human." Grace was borrowing a patronizing tone from an old boss as she stood up and leaned across the desk. "It sounds like you've come to the wrong place, sir. Are you sure your equipment--" because he was the type to have some, "--is working properly?"

He growled something that sounded like: "'Course it is! Not like those idiots in Cardiff who couldn't track a rift spike if it fell on 'em," and then glared at her a little more. 

Luck was in his favor, as the universe fell down on their heads. Betty came in, her hands agitated, as she grabbed another set of gloves and tossed them at Grace, "Live one, bullet wound, bleeder--"

"Type?"

"Purple."

Lovely. Grace couldn't even lock the old man in her office, since he'd followed Betty back into reception while Grace brought up the rear. 

Ignoring him, she got to work. The purple-blooded woman was twisting in and out. One moment a woman, the next a multi-faceted-something that Grace's mind was doing its best not to consider. A bullet had shattered one facet, embedding itself in her shoulder. 

"This is going to hurt," Grace warned, pulling her up and leaning her against Betty. She'd learned long ago that not all patients could be treated on their backs. Llangorlians were one such species. Putting them on their backs caused their hearts to speed up, and their bodies to over-compensate.

The bullet wasn't in as deep as it could have been, and Grace was thankful for that, her gloved fingers sticky after ten seconds of careful probing. Later, she would find a swipe of purple over her forehead from shoving her hair back with her wrist.

"Of course it will hurt," the Llangorlian said, her voice thick and husky with more than a normal oxygen-nitrogen mix. 

"Is your breathing unit functioning?" asked Betty, to keep the patient talking and focused on something else. Pain-killers had rather detrimental effects on Llangorlians.

"Yes. Did not hit." The woman managed, her eyes sliding closed (too many eyes, and Grace's brain firmly _ignored_ that).

"This is not standard procedure," groused the Scotsman.

Grace ignored him, too.

Once the bullet was out, she and Betty sat the woman back down. Betty had kept up a steady stream of conversation, which she let trail off as the woman drifted into a doze. 

Another peculiarity of the Llangorlians: they could sleep anywhere. 

"Good job," Betty told her, dealing with the clean-up of the wound site while Grace leaned against the reception desk and thanked God that no one else had been scheduled for that afternoon.

"You weren't too bad yourself," she replied before stripping off her gloves and dropping them into a bin. She washed her hands in the nearby sink before finding a bag of saline and re-gloving. 

Once the IV was started, she turned to face the old man. "I'm sorry we were interrupted. What was it you were here for again?"

He grumbled, then scratched his head, eyes darting to the Llangorlian, then back to Grace. "Torchwood," he spat, then scratched again.

"I'm sorry?" Grace wasn't exactly plugged into the international espionage market, or she might have recognized the name. As it was, it meant nothing to her, and seemed to be simply more gibberish.

"National threat," he waved a hand, then subsided.

"Yes, I can see that," Grace agreed, trying for patronizing again.

He glared at her, then glared at Betty. 

Betty simply raised an eyebrow at him, "Dr. Holloway, should I have building security remove this man?"

"That won't be necessary. I believe he was just leaving." Grace looked at him. His gaze dropped first, and she felt a flash of smugness that she tampered down with the reminder that he could be a dangerous and insane criminal.

Drawing himself up stiffly, he passed a glare to both of them, then smiled. It wasn't pleasant. He gestured at his forehead, then pointed at Grace, "Got some," he informed her before he swept out of the office, leaving behind two very bemused women.

Grace went to wash her face while Betty finished the bandaging on their newest alien patient and logged into the database to add the details to her patient record.

-=-

A few days later, Betty dropped a folder onto her desk. "Everything I could find on Torchwood. Some of it's possibly apocryphal."

Some of it probably wasn't. Grace spent three days, reading snatches of the folder on breaks, lunch and in-between patient record-keeping. Betty had taken over a large portion of that already, but Grace liked to be up-to-date. It saved bother when a new species trundled through the door.

"What do you think?" Betty asked her after she handed the folder back.

Grace had thought about it the night before, then slept restlessly. She half-smiled, "I think, if Torchwood are as good as they think they are, I'd like a word with them about the last almost-apocalypse."

"Been to Sunnydale then?" Betty joked. 

And that was that. Torchwood could be what it said in the folder, or it could be a crotchety old man who glared from under bushy brows and spoke without care for who might misunderstand him. 

Or it could be something in-between. What it wasn't, though, was a patient of Grace's.

-=-

For Grace to be fair to the Torchwood man, she would have to admit that 'bug apocalypse' hadn't been on the top of her list of 'reasons Torchwood might be cranky'. Not that it was her fault the nearby rift had been more than active; and at least _someone_ was taking care of those who were lost and stranded by the universe's sense of humor. 

"I don't like bugs," Betty announced again. 

Grace was sort of hiding behind Betty, who'd acquired a flamethrower (she'd said 'borrowed from a friend', which could be true. Betty's ex-lover had been a mechanic with a fetish for scrap metal art), "That's why we've exterminators in every four months, yes."

"Especially not big ones." A shudder went through Betty, and the flamethrower jiggled, flame jumping off the top and onto the floor.

The three beagle-sized bugs twitched, but stayed where they were. 

At some point during the evening, they'd lost track of the surprisingly spry old man from Scotland. He'd been swinging something that looked suspiciously like a hammer, but seemed to work well enough to drive the bugs back to their little dimensional portal.

Grace hadn't really understood that bit, but she figured it was similar to the TARDIS, except more of a door in space than a box. And there was no time travel involved. 

Or so she hoped.

Betty sent another stream of flame, and the bugs broke and ran, skittering their way back into the other room. 

They were lucky no one else was in the warehouse to witness the almost-invasion. Grace didn't feel particularly lucky, but things could have been invariably worse. Once the last of the bugs was back through the portal (chased with unexpected gusto by a man who looked old enough to be Grace's great-grandfather), the Torchwood man did something to it with his hammer.

A strange burning smell filled the air (topping the singed bug courtesy of Betty), and the wavering movement in the air solidified and then was gone.

"Good," the man grunted. He scratched something, then turned to look at them. "Good hands."

The last was barely decipherable, and Grace didn't ask for an elaboration. She didn't really have time to, as the man opened another door in the air and walked through it, leaving the two of them behind. 

"I bet that's bad for the fabric of space," Betty muttered, shooting a stream of flame through the air out of irritation.

"Probably." With a scowl, Grace took her arm, "Let's get out of here before something else happens."

-=-

Grace continued to keep her records, Betty graduated with a new degree in something advanced and ridiculous-sounding, and they continued to take care of their off the books clients. 

Occasionally, a cranky old man from Scotland would send them cryptic emails. Sometimes, he'd arrive himself for consultations (Betty claimed he was really there for the beaches).

And while they never faced an invasion of giant bugs again, there were other things.

Betty got to test her new and improved flamethrower on hysterical pepper-pots more than once. She was quite pleased with the result.

So was Grace.


End file.
